Just wondering.
They aren’t all the same, for starters.
I was at Ft Washington Men’s Shelter at 168th St in Manhattan in 1984. It was a massively huge room. As in “if you leave your cot to go to the bathroom, be sure to count how many cots you pass before you get to the aisle, then how many rows you walk past on that aisle to get to the door”. They didn’t turn the lights off at night. Place was full of smoke detectors whose batteries were past their prime and making those annoying high-pitched “change me” chirps. The security guards yelled and threatened with their batons. It was very anonymous, like being a homeless cat that some crazy cat lover would let into the garage and set out cat food. In the mornings we were turned out. There was no vestige of permanence like being able to have the same cot or a locker to keep stuff in or an address where you could receive mail or a phone number where someone could contact you.
My upgrade from that place was the shelter on Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital grounds: the honchos had decided that homelessness was “caused” by lack of services to the mentally ill and the money being thrown was being thrown at doing something about that problem, somehow, so a social worker told me they’d be looking for success stories and since I had a psych history I should parlay it. This shelter let us have a permanent bed assignment, a locker to put stuff in, and we could receive mail. It meant being able to fill out applications and leave a way someone could get in touch with me, and I got myself enrolled in college from there. Wasn’t all roses though, the security guards were far worse, much more violent, scared shitless of what we crazy lunatics might do.
Thank you for sharing. That’s a brief glimpse into a very different world for most of us.
As to your last sentence, that fear was certainly unfounded as to you. Was it justified even some by any of the other residents?
There were several violent people at that shelter. The overwhelming majority of them were on staff as security guards. I did have a roommate assigned to me who, with no prior altercations, reached out and ripped my eyeglasses off my face and twisted them into shrapnel. And at a later point I had a resident knock at my door and when I opened it, he charged me and assaulted me until other people came and broke it up; he said I was making sounds that he could not tolerate (music I was playing I guess?)
From the residents with a diagnosis, that’s all the violence I remember.
There was a large guy who was prone to something akin to seizures… some people said it was when he was “hearing voices”, name was Ronald. Peaceful and nice overall but when he was having an “attack” he went stalking down the hall cursing and moving rapidly and it was very scary even if you’d seen it before. He never hurt anyone in the process but it was easy to imagine otherwise.
I posted an AMA about my stay in a DC-area shelter (now three decades ago):
A couple years earlier, I was also briefly a guest at a church-run shelter. They wanted us to work in return for their largesse, and I thought that was a reasonable proposition, as I wasn’t jobless by choice and was always willing to work. They had us clearing a field of rocks and stones and I turned in a pretty formidable workday snatching up stones and tossing them into the wheelbarrow and then emptying the wheelbarrow into the big truck. Then they wanted us to attend a service and got kind of upset when I dissented with the position taken by the lay preacher or whatever he styled himself as. We weren’t supposed to have opinions, our status as homeless people obviously meant we’d wrecked our lives and needed advice and had none to offer others.
I didn’t regard homelessness as an awful tragedy. I had higher priorities than staying indoors and being embraced by the employer class and all that and I was young and stubborn and uninclined to be bossed around but willing to be an enthusiastic contributor if treated with respect. Was an intellectual but no college degree which didn’t help for either type of job. Was recognized as a feminine person which was more of a problem with the blue collar / unskilled labor jobs I was qualified for than it would have been in an office setting, even in the late 70s and early 80s.
At the religious-centric place they gave me an ultimatum they expected me to bow to, and instead I took my backback and left late at night to go walk and wait for the sunrise and hitch and move on.
There was another homeless guy in New York who organized a user-run group called Home Grown. He had been in my shelter in NY. We had 30-40 homeless people wanting to be on boards and commissions to address “the homeless problem”. Nobody wanted to let us have a seat at the table. There was a lot of money being thrown at “the homeless problem”. We could have run our own shelters and run rehab that would have actually gotten people up and out of the system, based on their individual circumstances and not a one size fits all therapy design.
I do believe this is a huge part of the problem. I was homeless recently and couch surfed with kindly friends or lived in my car until I found a place. I was unwilling to try the shelters here as I knew they were already overflowing.
I have a former homeless friend in Canada. She parlayed her life experience into a job working with homeless folks because she is clearly smart, clearly a hard worker, and clearly what they knew they needed. She forwent corporate life because they were against her strong independent streak. Thank heavens at least one community is listening to the homeless and making great strides towards helping them.
Hello,
I’m conducting a legal investigation involving a man who lived at the Creedmore shelter in 1984.
Would you be willing to speak with me about the shelter?
Thanks,
Bryce (bebenjet@kgardens.net)
This is closed pending admin/legal review.